I was sitting here kind of pondering stuff, and I realized that I don't know anyone that I think has better taste in music than I do.
And then I realized that everyone in the entire world probably thinks that. Because, y'know, you like what you like, and you feel justified in liking it. And you quietly judge others for failing to rise to the standards set by your musical taste. No one sits there thinking, well, I like this, but I wish I had good taste like [some other person] and didn't like it. Do they?

I don't know, maybe it's not everyone. Maybe it's just those whose arrogance KNOWS NO BOUNDS.

This book has a character named "Madame Psychosis"...

...which totally cracks my shit up. The novel in question is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and it's one of the reasons I haven't posted much lately. The other reason being that I'm BONE IDLE. It's also like like 1,000 pages long, of which the last 40 pages are endnotes in 8 point font. Plus the chronology and plot are completely whacked in the best post-modern style--I had to take notes while reading for the first 400 pages or so. But damn it's addictive. I finished it a couple days ago. I'm still sort of digesting it, but I think it's one of my favorite modernish novels. Seriously, it's so good. Fucking hilarious, and yet moving as well.

Here's a little quotey-quote:

The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in 1940 by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies.

Endless Approach has a little mp3 blog going, in the righthand sidebar. It's awesome. Go check it out before the fascists make him take it down.

A post that only Jedno will really appreciate

So I live in this place called "the Czech Republic." Three whole words, every time I have to refer to the place where I live. Others before me have seen this as a problem; in fact, people have been trying to come up with a one-word designation for the country ever since they parted brass rags with "-slovakia" in 1993. Here are some suggestions that I found on a message board here:

Czechia. The semi-official name. I think it sounds gay.
Czech. That's an adjective. Unacceptable.
Moravia. Ha! The Moravians make up the smaller and poorer half of the CR, and like most somewhat ignored minorities, they've got their pride, dammit. It's as if we changed "the United States" to "Dixie."
East Germany. Hey, no one's using it anymore, and it describes the economic and architectural situation pretty well.
Achjovia. "Ach jo..." is the Czech equivalent of "mm-hm." It's the favorite word of old ladies on the tram.

And my favorite:
Tojeproblem. "That's a problem..." Basically, it means that whatever you wanted, you're shit out of luck. Czechs love saying this.

Modest Mouse: Tundra/Desert

Last year we were out in the van, all of us, smoke seeping out of the windows, the acrid smell of cheap beer in the air. It must have been early in the fall, because it was warm enough to have the sliding doors open to the dusty night. We were listening to Modest Mouse. Marian set it to track 11, but first she paused it and called for quiet. 'Listen up,' she said, 'this is what F. used to do when we played this song.' Years ago, in a different van, when he was still alive. As the track played, she told a story over it...not poetry, just the natural rhythm of words and sentences. About getting up in the morning and going to class, very simple. Anyone can do it, once you've heard it; you just have to keep your eye on the display, so you can say the words "...class begins" so that they explode when the song does. Very simple, but the juxtaposition of the spoken words and the song seemed to sum up the cold, tired futility of being at the college. Because we all knew about it, about getting up in the cold morning air and going to a place we didn't want to be, for abstract reasons that weren't convincing or comforting at all on a daily or an hourly or a minute-by-minute basis.

Hearing that, and trying to do it myself, made me think for the first time that maybe the theories about the origin of the Iliad are right: that the poem could have existed for centuries without being written down, and yet be the same poem every time and yet not a rote memorization. You hear something like that, and you don't remember it by heart, you remember it like a story. You remember its effect, like a map out of emotions, so that in the end you don't remember it through the individual words at all but backwards, feeling your way to the right words through their effects. Not "This line comes next" but "The words I say next should make me feel this way." I'm not even close to being able to express this so it makes linear sense.

Every time I hear that song, though, I try to tell the story over it, and I think about it all, the van, the college, the man I didn't know.

The sky is blue, and it's snowing buckets. I find this very disturbing.

Also, the wind is blowing so hard that the snow is going sideways. Happy Get-Frostbite-on-the-Way-Home Day!

I just finished reading a Stephen King book called The Stand. Stop judging me, I didn't have anything else to read and the satellite TV is in German. Anyway, it's actually a pretty good book--well thought out, three dimensional characters, some good descriptions. There's something about the way Stephen King writes, though; it makes me feel kind of greasy after a while. Just...this weirdly gross and obsessive atmosphere, I guess.
But other than that, there was one thing about the bood that just about drove me insane, and that was the fact that there were a frillion little tiny continuity errors. I started tweaking out about it after a while, like what were you thinking, you can't mention that once and never mention it again, don't you have editors? And really, I wonder about that: it's Stephen fucking King, at the peak of his popularity, no less, he couldn't hire a couple interns to tie off the loose ends? I mean, damn.

Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job...

Everyone has to grow up sometime.

--my mother, in a recent phone conversation.

Part of growing up is having a career, unless you have a lifetime vocation of another kind.

Lifetime vocations that are not careers include things like being a wife/mother and entering the religious life. The Lord didn't make me for the nunnery, I'm pretty sure, and the other option is not something I'm going to rely on happening.

Conclusion: I belong to the set {everyone}, and I do not belong to the set {other lifetime vocation}. Therefore, I need a career.

What's a career?
A long-term job path. Preferably, one where you become a [something]. This is a good way to check if it's a career or not: you can't become a restocking-books-at-Borders-late-at-night, but you surehell can become a doctor.

A career must, at least in the long-term, make you financially secure. Otherwise it's not a career, it's a hobby.

A career is like a road map for your life. A road map doesn't guarantee at all that you'll end up in the place you thought you would, but it's a good idea to have one. Also, road maps and careers are both things that your parents strongly urge you to have; if they can, they'll buy you one.

Sometimes your parents refer to this whole concept as "what you want to do with your life." Usually it's in the form of a question, as in "That's nice, but what do you want to do with your life?" This provides a valuable insight into your parents' thinking on this point--it's not just that they want you to move out of the basement, and it's not that they won't love you anymore if you don't make partner before you're thirty. It's that they want you to do something with your life. Something real, something important. Something worthy of your talents. It's true, what you do with your life in the essential sense doesn't have to be the same thing that you make your money from. But for most people it is, at least in large part. The point is, what you make your money from should be fulfilling, something you can be proud of, because you're going to spend a lot of your life doing it.

Conclusion: For all these reasons, the object is to find a career that you'll be good at, that is worthy of you, and that you actually want to do, not just for the money.

So. I already have a job. And it almost fits the definition of a career. It passes the first test: you can indeed become a university lecturer. I'm good at it. Being a teacher is a worthy occupation, and it's fitting . The fact that it's at the university level doesn't actually make it more worthwhile in itself, but there's a certain added dignity to the name, at least. And the important part: I want to do it. I love doing it. I can think of a number of things that I'd be good at, and that sound impressive, but this is the first work I've found that I want to do. I would do it for free, and that's coming from someone who likes money and hates to work. In fact, I have done it for free, every single exam week at the college. This is my calling. I'm as sure of that as I am about anything.

But. My parents are right. The job I have right now does not fit one of the criteria: it will not make me financially secure, in the long run. I make enough money to live comfortably over here. I travel a lot, I drink good beer. I feel pretty fucking rich, in fact. But I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the Czech Republic. I love it here, but when you come down to it, my family and my friends are in the US. And because of the currency difference, the longer I stay here, the more completely I'm cutting myself off from being able to go home, ever.

Conclusion: I've found my calling; all I need is a way to make American money doing it. But I'm tired of typing now, so I'll leave it until a future post to present My Cunning Plan in all its glory.


NOTE: In this essay, "you" is actually me. I'm explaining it to myself, so I can figure out how to explain it to my parents. I'm not judging anyone's career plans or lack thereof, nor am I trying to lecture you like a Dutch uncle. No need to get your panties in a bunch.

What squicks me out: Communal handtowels.

I guess I'm lucky they have any towel options at all in the bathroom at work; Lord knows they lack other options such as, say, hot water (did I mention it's -3 Celsius today?). But still, every time I gingerly dry the tips of my fingers on that big non-luxurious cotton towel, I think about all the other people who've used it. Shudder.

I remember my first introduction to the concept of the communal handtowel...I was about 12, and we were watching the sort-of classic Clint Eastwood movie Firefox, in which he plays a fighter pilot on a top-secret mission to steal a high tech Soviet jet that's controlled by...MIND BULLETS!! I shit you not, that's what it's about. Go rent it, it's great. There's a scene in there where Eastwood is fleeing through the Moscow Metro, and he ends up hiding in the Metro bathroom. A soldier comes into the bathroom, washes his hands, and wipes them on the very obviously filthy communal handtowel. To which my family reacted with a collective Eeeewwwww.

Little did I realize then that ten short years later, I'd experience the (post) Communist communal handtowel on a far more personal basis.

Friday night was pretty cool. Hung out with Depressed Michael, listened to music, drank a lot of beer.
Michael: "I'm really empiricist about my music."
Me[slightly confused]: "Um...yeah, isn't everyone? You know it through experiencing it, and all that stuff."
Michael: "Oh wait...that's not the word I'm looking for. I meant imperialist. Yeah, that's it."

That made more sense. I'd never thought of it in those terms before, but I'm definitely imperialist about my music...when I really love a song or a band or an album, I want to grab people by the shoulders and make them listen to it, play it until they love it as much as I do. This rarely works as well as I hope it will; people have an innate (and justified) resistance to being led to water and forced to drink. And besides, even if the music speaks to your soul and you love it, it's hard to express that outwardly. No matter how you try, the experience outruns the description of it.

You can get close, though, with the right people. The best nights in the van at Koenigstein were like that...when you come as close as this life allows to having the same experience of the music, all of you, washed in it. The music like a physical presence around you, the love between all of you for each other and for the music, so tangible and real that it hurts. Not much said, halting sentences...Listen to this, so fucking gorgeous, and your eyes meet: I know, I hear it too.

This is the last week of the semester here at the uni. It's known as Credit Week, because this is the week where every student in the department knocks on my door looking for affirmation. I'm kidding, of course; it's just the ones in my 2nd and 3rd year classes, and what they're looking for is my signature on their credit books. They have a weird system here: first of all, ninety percent of the classes are pass/fail, or in their terms, credit only, and only a few of those have a final exam. The students have the right to three attempts to pass the final exam. Which makes it sound super easy, except there's some other aspect to the system that I don't understand, which forces the students to take like 16 classes every semester. So it's tough, all right, it's just not that hard in any one class. It's like the Bataan Death March of mediocrity.

Anyways. The other thing is that they all have these little booklets, where they write down the names of all the courses they're taking, and at the end of the semester they have to get the instructor's signature. They also have to enter it on the computer system, which...defies description. Basically I have to go online, book a classroom for a 3 minute period sometime next week, and then they all go online and sign in, and we all pretend that we met there and did the credit signing then, because Heaven forbid the date in their credit books should differ from the pretend date in the computer, even though it's PRETEND and we all KNOW it. So I've spent the week writing the Czech word for "pass" and a random date next week and then signing underneath it, in a tiny-ass blank space. I've written my own name so many damn times I'm starting to misspell it.

But it's ok. Last day of the semester, and it looks like I'll survive it without any major fuck-ups (knock on wood). Walked to work this morning through the weather...it was doing that chunky rain thing. Not snow, not hail, not sleet, just...chunky rain. Maybe it is called sleet. I wouldn't know, frozen stuff doesn't usually fall from the sky where I come from.

The tram at 5:50 in the morning: Jumpin'.
The fact that I know this from my own experience: Depressing.
That I learned this while going to work, instead of from partying until that time:: Super depressing.

childhood revelations

Why is it so fascinating to write about your own childhood? I started writing something a few days ago; it was meant to be about this one song that I remember hearing when I was about ten, and how I just now figured out what it was. But almost immediately it spiralled out of control into a freakin Thomas Pynchon novel about my days as a pre-teen at the roller rink. I'm still trying to find a way to stick to the point, but I don't know if I can do it...I keep thinking of new revelations about my then-self, so many aspects to life then that I only understand now. Maybe it's because it's finally far enough in the past that it's not painful to remember; I can be reconciled to who I was then. Looking back on my late teen years and closer is really tough, because in so many ways it still is who I am, and I can only focus on all the ways I hate that. This is something I noticed as a child (oh shit, here it goes again): there were some books that you had to be old enough for, not because they were particularly mature in their content, but because you yourself had to be able to distance yourself sufficiently from the subject of the book that you didn't interpret their humiliations and pratfalls as your humiliations and pratfalls. I remember getting so furious at the Ramona books at the age of seven or so--I think actually chucked one of them against the wall because I could see myself too damn clearly in it, and it drove me nuts. And yet a year later I loved them. Because I knew: it had been me in the story at one time, but it wasn't anymore.

Weird, huh?

And then it hit me [see previous post]: I'm trying to plan a career in academia. What am I thinking? This was the career that was furthest from my mind while I was at the college, because I was every day reminded of what sanctimonious bastards those people are. College administrators, I mean. And now I'm trying to work out how to break it to my parents that instead of coming home and going to law school like a sane person, I want to make this a career. Me, for the rest of my life, dealing with the beaurocracy of one university or another, which is the worst kind of beaurocracy because you can't have a fucking bloody-ass revolution and sweep the whole system away. Or, not usually. Not without Allen Ginsberg sitting on a platform and saying "Om", anyways, and that dude's been dead for a while now.

Oh please Lord, someone take away my italics key, because I am losing my shit over here.

But ok, then again....I was talking to Wavelet the other night, and we both agreed...we can't see ourselves doing anything but teaching. Well, I can see myself doing other things, and being good at them, probably. But knowing that teaching is out there, knowing how much I fucking love it....I have to do it. So I'll find a way. I'll deal with the bullshit. I'll get a master's degree. I'll teach English to college kids, maybe forever, maybe just until I find something else. Not just something else, but something that I want to do more than I want to do this. But right now, I can't think of anything.

Besides, from what I hear, being a junior associate is some shite.

BGRRAAAAA!!!

Holy motherfucking SHIT.

How in the name of jiminy fucking pete does one become the head of a LARGE department at a LARGE university while conspicuously LACKING every motherfucking quality needed to DEAL with people? Of course, I know the answer to this...you get there by pure seniority and the possession of a Ph.D. There ain't no place on that Ph.D. diploma where it says "people skills."

I'm still in awe. The woman does not flocking listen when you buggerfucking talk to her. It's like you're talking to thin air. Just being in the same room with her is like chewing on tinfoil.

This round of spittle-flecked raving brought to you by The Departmental Meeting: No, It's Not Over Yet, Useless Minion.

Damn right, it's a beautiful day

It's so fucking gorgeous out today. The sun's shining like it's never gonna stop, the air is fresh, the wind is gentle. It's probably a sign of global warning and the Doom to Come, but fuck it, it's beautiful. I walked to the office today, a couple of miles. I used a route I haven't ever taken before, and it was brilliant. Walking down the little side roads, with the city ahead of me and the snowy mountain behind me, and the railroad tracks beside me.

I'm cleaning up my office today, and grading assloads of tests. Haven't really gotten to the grading part yet, since the first task is to find the damn things--hence the clean-up. Cleaning up is not something I normally do...some of y'all are snickering right now, all No shit, hon. And it's true, I have a very high tolerance for letting things lie where they fall. But the chaos has finally reached the critical mass necessary to get me off my ass, plus it's the last week of the semester, and I have to be able to justify awarding about two hundred individual course credits. I don't mind, really; once I start organizing things I find a lot of OCD satisfaction in the task.

It's all good. The weather is insanely nice, like April in Atlanta, and my window's open. Through it I can see the copper roof of the theater, and the spires of the town hall, and the flocks of pigeons circling and wheeling above the square. Holy shit, how did I get here? Why? I keep thinking this is too damn good, this strange blissful fucking joy. Sometimes I have trouble trusting it; I feel like it's a loan that I'll have to pay back with interest someday. But I know that's not how it is. God's not a Calvinist.

Anyways. Back to the clean-up.

When I was in first grade, one of the many routines was the My Weekend paragraph. Every Monday morning, each of us got out our notebooks and wrote a few painstakingly printed sentences about what we'd done over the weekend. As I recall, after the first couple weeks of the project, my entries were almost completely fabricated. My weekends were all the same, and terrifically boring to write down, and besides, I had a runaway imagination and a penchant for lying. That notebook showed some pretty kickass weekends: I didn't just go to the zoo, I got to ride on the elephant. My family spent the weekend on a boat, with SHARKS!

At some point in the spring term, my teacher noticed a particularly lurid paragraph about the trip to Germany, complete with castles and medieval knights, that my family had taken over the weekend, and somehow it dawned upon her that this might not be God's own truth. She took me aside and asked me, with sincere pain in her eyes, if I was fibbing.

I mumbled something shamefaced. What I was thinking was more like, of course I am, you stupid cow. I'm six years old, if I didn't make shit up I wouldn't have anything to write about. I remember being slightly shocked that it had taken her that long to catch on; I hadn't exactly been going for realism in my stories, and I thought it was fairly obvious that they weren't, strictly speaking, true. That was when it dawned on me that (a) I was smarter than my teachers, and (b) I would have to spend the rest of my school career hiding this fact from them.

Well, ok, that last sentence is a bit bullshit. What I realize now is that I should have made it my absolute goal to hide my intelligence from the teachers and from my fellow students. But back then, I thought I was winning when I pointed out the ignorance and errors of those around me. In retrospect, I was kind of a little shit.

N.B.: This post contains a fair amount of what they call tooting one's own horn. Tough shit--it's my website and I'll be arrogant if I want to.

I'm about half-way through Anna Karenina, and holy fucking shit it's so damn good. So far I've managed to restrain myself from taking it to work, because that would cause an even further drop in productivity. I already spend large sections of the day arsing around on the internet instead of grading shit or planning lessons--if I brought that book to work I'd probably reach negative levels of productivity, destroying stuff I'd already done or something.

So instead what I do is I come home from a hard day of teaching (and it is hard--I'm teaching a double class load for two weeks.), I make myself some dinner, and then I sit down on my bed with a glass of whiskey and Anna K. By 10pm I am full of the LOVE, let me tell you.* Damn, that book is good.

*Oh come on, I only drink about a shot a night.

Best New Year's EVER

Two girls wandering the streets of Prague, circa 4:30 am, January 1.

R: [reassuringly] Dude, hey, don't worry. I mean, I'm kind of gone, but you're fine. You're so not drunk, dude. You're gonna get us home, you're doing great.
J: Ridley, we are BOTH DRUNK and we are NEVER GOING TO GET HOME.
R: Whoa...no...no, come on, you're not drunk, babe. You're maintaining.
J: YOU'RE WALKING IN THE STREET AGAIN.
R: Oh right. Sorry.

Mám Internetu!!

I'm back online in the office. Yeah dog.

On the other hand, now I have no excuse.